I recently picked up Huawei Reliance Netconnect datacard from a company outlet in Bengaluru. I currently am on Vista 64 and wanted to make sure if the Reliance Data card was a plug-n-play or if I needed any extra drivers installed on my system to get the net-card up and running. The guys at the counter confirmed that I would be getting all the necessary softwares for Windows Vista, which left me satisfied.

Little did I know, the customer support had no idea what a 64-bit OS was! When I got the net-card, I realized they had given me 32-bit Vista drivers. The whole experience got worse, being a weird OS that Vista 64 is, it didn’t accept my datacard. The worst was yet to come, the official reliance website didn’t have any drivers for 64 bit.

I had no option but hope that Google would solve my problem. As expected the proficient Google did not let me down. My searching skills coupled with my luck I found all the required drivers on some Thailand Hutchison website.

Download all the necessary drivers on to your system. Quite a catch, since you do not have net connection yet right .. You can get it on to your pen drive from the nearest Cyber cafe.

Installing the data card and getting it to work is a very simple process. Must say Reliance folks have Done a great job here.

1> Plug in the datacard and when it asks for the drivers, point to the location where the downloaded drivers are located.

2> Install the dialer software which is packed in the cd-rom.

After installation the application pops up and looks like this.

Now the card is online. The next step is to ‘Create a connection‘.

1> Go to Settings->Network Connection Settings.

2> Select New from the dialog box.

3> Put in the username and password as your phone number.

That’s it, you are all set to rock online!!

The new connection dialog box.

Now there’s another problem with Vista and the dialer software. It keeps on crashing. And there is no known solution to it, atleast not any that I know of. Even though the software crashes, the net connection continues to work fine. The problem is when one wants to disconnect, a re-start of the ‘software’ is necessary.

I’m trying to find a working update to this problem. So expect an update to this article soon ;).